"Famous person who worked on the project disagrees and does not explain why" does not meaningfully contribute to a discussion. We're left to throw random hypotheses at a wall with no evidence.

He did explain why - he thinks the linked article is nonsense. What more could he write?

It isn't like this is some scientist throwing out a fact about nature and needs to give further evidence - Miguel de Icaza's opinion in and of itself was a pretty influential part of the decisions made at the time. He is qualified to know his own opinion.

The article does look like bunk anyway, there were a lot of MS threats around at the time but it was never picked out as a serious part of GNOME's decision making.

If I ask "Why do birds fly south for the winter?", and an ornithologist just says "Well it's not what your friend said!" and walks away, that is not a reason why birds fly south for the winter. It doesn't help anyone understand the subject. But because the ornithologist is an authority figure, people take that as an explanation. People will then chatter among themselves and decide that whatever the group thinks must be true.

Besides the fact that he did not give a reason why GNOME/GNOME 3/Unity happened, he is also still a human being, and thus is subject to bias, deception, forgetfulness, mis-remembering, etc. That's why if you want a real discussion it's useful to have evidence, not just whatever hypothesis sounds good to an in-group.

The ornithologist is a scientist. They do not control what the birds do, they study what the birds do. The birds make the decisions.

Miguel started the GNOME project (with, obviously, lots of similar involvement from other people). He is closer to a manager, ie, a person making the decisions. He can just say that the proposed article is nonsense and that is pretty significant evidence.

> he is also still a human being, and thus is subject to bias, deception, forgetfulness, mis-remembering, etc.

Microsoft threatening legal action is not the sort of thing that slips the mind.

> That's why if you want a real discussion it's useful to have evidence

The evidence is Miguel says it is nonsense. You can spill a lot of ink and not come up with anything half as convincing. Miguel's one line is more evidence of why GNOME acted as they did than the entire article managed to scrape together, unless Mr Liam on Linux happens to also be on the GNOME core dev team and I've just never heard of him. But I don't think he was. I doubt he was in the room or involved in any of the decisions.

You misunderstand, cryptic public statements are a longstanding part of GNOME's commitment to transparency and user cooperation.

In this house we trust science which is why we must take for granted the statements of an important person.